A Conservative Magazine May Pay a Price for Being Unfriendly to Trump

Image

Stephen F. Hayes, the editor in chief of The Weekly Standard, at his office in Washington last year. The future of the conservative publication is uncertain.CreditCreditLexey Swall for The New York Times

Other conservative magazines, websites and news empires have thrived since President Trump took office by cheering him on or, at least, playing down his faults.

But in the spring of 2017, The Weekly Standard let the world know that it was following its own course, come what may.

The magazine’s billionaire owner, Philip F. Anschutz, bought into the plan — or so it seemed — and its editor in chief, Stephen F. Hayes, set out to increase the size of the staff by a third. He also banned alt-right-style, partisan clickbait stories and encouraged investigative and feature reporting that often put the magazine on the wrong side of Mr. Trump and his allies.

That experiment may have now run its course. And the outcome has called into question whether the conservative media world can abide journalism that questions the new orthodoxy.

Under Mr. Hayes’s leadership, The Weekly Standard did not see itself as part of the home team. Unlike some other conservative outlets, it did not, for instance, shift its longtime free-market views so that they were suddenly aligned with the president’s strategy of imposing trade tariffs. The magazine did not nod in agreement at a notion, newly popular in right-wing circles, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation is part of a nefarious “deep state.”

This week, as CNN first reported, word spread in the Standard newsroom that the magazine’s ownership had not approved a 2019 budget, meaning its future was in peril. In a statement, the parent company, Clarity Media, said it was “exploring a number of possibilities regarding the future of The Weekly Standard,” blaming “the evolving business landscape.”

At the same time, the company announced it was seeking to expand The Washington Examiner, a conservative publication that is far friendlier to the president than The Weekly Standard.

People familiar with the relationship between The Weekly Standard and its parent company told me that it had deteriorated in recent months.

Things got so bad that, at one point, the two sides discussed parting ways after hitting an impasse over The Standard’s request for more autonomy, and Clarity Media suggested a sale. The magazine’s leadership team worked up a plan to find a buyer, floating the idea to various venture capitalists and investors last spring. But Clarity ultimately decided against it, these people said.

They say there were a variety of factors at play, including the magazine’s commitment to cultural coverage and its refusal to engage in traffic-driving clickbait. But it also had to do with its often critical coverage of Mr. Trump and other Republicans, as well as the “Never Trump” stance of the magazine’s co-founder William Kristol as he made the rounds on cable television — at times raising hackles at the home office.

Pro-Trump coverage is to conservative media what anti-Trump coverage is to liberal media — a great driver of internet traffic and ratings. The Standard team told potential investors that while it suffered some print subscription losses — down 7,000, or nearly 10 percent, since Mr. Trump’s election, Politico reported — its online subscriptions were up and it had more than doubled its online traffic.

Clarity would not comment beyond its initial statement.

Mr. Kristol started the magazine in 1995 with Fred Barnes and John Podhoretz, with financing from Rupert Murdoch, who sold to Mr. Anschutz, the owner of Clarity Media, in 2009.

The Weekly Standard came to define the “neocon” stance of the Bush era. Its role in making the case for the Iraq war placed it in a camp that had little in common with the views of the more isolationist Mr. Trump, who positioned himself during the 2016 campaign as an anti-interventionist opposed to the Iraq war.

And on election night, Representative Steve King of Iowa barred a Standard reporter from his victory reception because of its report that he had referred to immigrants as “dirt” during his campaign.

On Wednesday, I caught up with Mr. Kristol, who is now an editor at large, handing the day-to-day operation over to Mr. Hayes a couple of years ago.

He wouldn’t comment on the internal back and forth, but he indicated he still wasn’t sure the magazine was a goner. And he said there was still room in conservative media for Trump-critical voices.

“I’m obviously very proud of what we’ve accomplished over 23 years, but there’s nothing I’m prouder of than the last two years, under Steve’s leadership, in making the case for a conservatism that stands apart from the current disfigurement of conservatism,” Mr. Kristol said. “We’re absolutely committed to keeping the voice of The Weekly Standard alive in its current form with its current ownership, or under different auspices, or maybe in a somewhat different way.”

The threat to The Weekly Standard drew an outcry from some conservative commentators.

“America will be worse off without @weeklystandard to fight for a principled, un-Trumpified conservatism,” Max Boot, a conservative columnist at The Washington Post, wrote on Twitter.

In an interview on Wednesday morning, Charlie Sykes, the conservative radio host and a contributing editor at The Weekly Standard, said he wasn’t sure exactly why Clarity Media was weighing the magazine’s future.

“I have argued for some time that it’s very difficult to craft a business model for non-Trump media these days,” he said. “I do think a lot of people on the right think of conservative media as a safe space for them. There’s a great deal of resentment for conservatives who are going to push back against Trump and Trumpism.”

The Weekly Standard staff may find out its fate next week, after a planned meeting between its leadership team and Clarity Media executives.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Against Trump, And Suffering Consequences. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe